skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are 43 countries[1] with more English speakers than New Zealand. What led you to work on NZ first, rather than say, India or Philippines?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-s...

EDIT: Many of these countries aren't as "online" as the ones with Her Majesty on their money. But, I should add India scores better on the "number of Internet users" scale than the UK, NZ or Canada.

India should theoretically be the next stop for any startup wishing to expand into other English-speaking markets.
Although they might have lost $2K on cupcakes, but the amount of money they would have made by attracting customers on credit is huge.

So generally offering things on credit is like bait to catch customers, there is risk I agree. But profits from such schemes vastly exceed losses, to make them almost negligible.

Lets say you own a bakery, you sell cupcakes on credit. Say you sell $40K worth cupcakes an year to a company. There are chances that you may go under a loss of $2K if the company folds. Will you go for it, or do not offer any credit and lose $40K worth cupcake businesses to somebody else?
If you are genuinely interested in examples of its practical utility, I suggest you lay out clear criteria for what would constitute acceptable evidence to you. It might also help to give examples of which non-trivial parts of mathematics you do find useful, with reasons for why.
The rise of the EDM prodigies
Most scientific testings on GMOs aren't done on period long enough to be significant.

Over a long enough time period, it has been shown all foods lead to death.
> this is just what I do with code.

Really? That sounds like something I would not expect to get away with in a number of situations. Like, for most of the stuff I've done as a student and as an employee I have considered stuff like that to be totally out of the question.

(And in this case, it doesn't even feel that much like "my" code. It's mostly written by them Coursera course people, with a few blanks filled out by me. I'm not sure how cool I think it is to upload other people's code to publicly available places without checking with them first.)
Not only were they bought by Sony, they were bought by Sony for $380 million dollars.

Shows what a difference a business model can have. They both had cloud gaming technologies, but while OnLive wanted to sell it right to consumers, Gaikai went for the publishers.
Can you be Obsessionate about something?
Regarding 2 I think it's sometimes true - for example people don't like math, when they don't understand it. But when somehow they notice they're good at some branch of math - most starts to love it, cause they can beat challange. At least it worked that way for me for math and programming. Similiar story for team sports - I love basketball cause I was higher than most people in middle school so I was good at it.

Other thing is - when you need to do sth you love for living - it sometimes become a chore instead of passion. External vs internal motivation etc.
Zedd's brilliant track 'Spectrum' (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsuVMdnF8A0) features in mashup prodigy Kap Slap's latest hourlong Back To School mix (http://soundcloud.com/kapslapbootlegs/back-to-school-mix). If you want some electro/dance music to pump up your day, give those links a listen.

I discovered Kap Slap right here on HN and I'm thankful to the people who recommended him. He's a great curator the sort of music I like.
I realize the bamboo part is not the point of this post, but can anyone confirm that this is actually how (some) bamboo grows? The only references to it I've found all go back on Coelho's novel. As far as I know/knew, bamboo shoots reach most of their full length in their first year.
I have a hard time understanding why people bought FB IPO stock. The P/E ratio was around 100 when it went public, and their main revenue source didn't seem to be growing fast enough to justify this.

I know hindsight is 20/20, but I'm genuinely curious: why did people think this was a good deal? (Aside from the fact that it might have popped a lot more on opening day due to general public interest.)
True.

Putting up a Wiki as documentation for a project/API, essentially means "we don't have time to write documentation, so we jotted together some napkin notes, maybe you can come in and fix them".

I've never seen "wiki for documentation" work in practice. It's always left in some semi-incoherent state, stale and incomplete.
I see that you use VW for machine learning. You should ask the lead developer (John Langford) what he thinks of the efficacy of mathematics for machine learning given most of the algorithms it uses were derived from theoretical considerations (e.g., SGD, LDA, reductions, etc.)

Would you describe him as a "pencil pushing fraud" too?
Oracle Launches Oracle Java ME Embedded 3.2
In modern gaming responsiveness is the prerequisite to everything. You can't fight the laws of physics. Server-side only latency hiding just does not work: there is always a noticeable delay between a key press and visual response.

In addition a decent gaming PC doesn't cost much these days and games on mobile devices are as enjoyable as desktop and console ones. They will get even cheaper and cooler with time.

There is no reason for existence of such a service.
Wow! He has to slow his heart down!
Thoughts on Code Schools
I am surprised they put "use your familiar desktop" in there.
I think you're reading past the point of the parent comment which is that the owners have right to charge whatever they want, even if it's unaffordable.
Why there are things that, for example, block other things when watching TV (2d TV) and where they are. Why they are all "in the same direction"...

This is the first, simplest, off-hand example I can come up with.

Things are blocked "in parallel" (assuming the camera is far away from the objects) because that projection is a linear map (I repeat, assuming "far away focus") and has a one dimensional kernel: 2d + 1d = 3d, which means (flat TV + orthogonal lines = 3d world), that is the dimension formula.
So - this has nothing to do with NSQ - just my $0.02. Maybe zeromq has changed a lot since I looked at it quite a while back. The trouble we constantly ran into was zeromq is really just a fancy socket library - this means that you have to program all the logic yourself if you want certain things to happen if messages cannot be delivered (e.g. log the fact at a minimum), or get queued abnormally long, or get acks from the other side etc.
Which is fine - you have to do all this yourself with plain sockets unless you just need a fire & forget system(albeit with the smarts of retrying and failover and some convenience of pub-sub). However we ran into problems where we could not get the info out of zmq that we wanted, such as the fact a peer had failed, the current rtt, and other things - leaving the gain we'd get from zmq at practically nothing.
I found Udacity's class (CS373, ST101) and the 2011 ai class also explained bayesian very well by Sebastian Thrun.
Even though its now dying tech(I think?), Flash/actionscript would be my recomendation. It's the only platform where you can make real games and easily share them online. The built-in tools for working with animations are great. Though perhaps kids would benefit from a more hand-holding game-maker type of setup.
Great to see this post here on Hacker News!
I work at flaregames and wholeheartedly agree with Klaas, we're asshole-free and that's not an understatement. :)
25 years? Aren't there public companies still very alive and kicking that were founded before ww2? Whose stock is still pretty valuable?

Boeing comes to mind. BMW as well. General Electric maybe. Actually plenty of things in the hardware space.
Unless the game you are playing doesn't require lots of micro/twitch, like the new XCOM game, all the total war series, sim city, anno series etc.
You can be obsessive about it.
> I have zero sympathy for him. His investment strategy appears to have been "find a bigger sucker" and, unfortunately for him, he turned out to be the bigger sucker.

While I have no sympathy for him specifically, if a significant risk was deliberately kept from potential investors then I'd support investors more generally (I'm sure there were many who had less silly investment plans, who were genuinely investing in a company to see it and their investment grow long term) if they demanded an investigation into why this did end up staying hidden until after the IPO.

If fb fought to keep the information hidden, the situation can't as easily be filed under "it is the investor's problem that they didn't ask/research" as many stock market moans can be.
My 2012 setup
Parallella: A Supercomputer For Everyone
You forgot:

4) The supposed benefits of cloud gaming were never as big as a deal in the first place, and quickly becoming less and less interesting.

Today even almost the lowest-end of notebooks you can buy will get you a better gaming experience than OnLive (better graphics, less latency, no internet connection required, choose all your own games), for gaming on the go phones and tablets are pretty capable, and last but not least you can pick up a used PS3 or 360 with a whole stack of games for less than 1 year of OnLive.

I've said from day one that the whole idea of building expensive, specialized data centers in the hope that people will pay to play games on them, is simply a stupid business idea. Casual gamers will happily use whatever cheap device to play simple games, and serious gamers will always want the best possible gaming experience, which is not what OnLive will ever be able to offer. Cloud gaming is a lost cause IMO.
The "average Joe investor" stories seem weirdly out of place, particularly for a Bloomberg piece. I guess it's a shallow attempt to engender sympathy, which is odd because I have precisely zero sympathy for either of them.

Lots of people (myself included) had been saying that Facebook was overvalued pre-IPO. I don't say this as any testament to any investment acumen I purport to possess (on the contrary, I largely suck at particularly short term share trading). What I do mean is that as an outsider with some cursory research and common sense, this was entirely predictable.

The only unknown with the IPO was how irrational the market would be and I'm glad to see it wasn't.

The people who say "look at the eyeballs they have; the sky is the limit" are the last people you should take investment advice from. Facebook had (and has) two primary sources of revenue: advertising and virtual goods. Valued against similar companies it was overvalued. And still is (IMHO).

I think this piece overstates that Facebook was attempting to hide things here. It's natural that any IPO will try to disclose as little as possible and try to be as positive as possible while stil being truthful and accurate.

Personally I may think of buying in if its gets down to $10-12.

Even so, Facebook is an extremely risky investment. Instagram is a cautionary tale here: from nothing to existential threat that you need to buy-to-shelve for $1 billion in two years... well, I guess it doesn't take much to threaten Facebook.
That's similar to saying that x86 asm is able to deal with a large number of paradigms. LLVM IR might be a a viable target to avoid writing your own native code generators, but that does not a universal bytecode VM for dynamic languages make.

It sure would have been nice if Parrot had succeeded there...
Please open to Europe!
The software development final exam: Mathematics
Thanks for this link, it's great!
Why would we use a payment processor that only works in the US and Canada? I mean everything I've seen about Stripe looks utterly fantastic, but we've been waiting ages for it to come to Britain and Europe, when is this actually going to happen? What actual roadblocks are in the way of this happening? What have the team responsible for this been doing for the past year or so, sitting on their arses?
I use Vagrant (http://www.vagrantup.com) as a development environment, so I don't have to pollute my OSX installation with dozens of server packages, environments etc.

Other programs I use every day:

1) Sublime Text 2 - great editor

2) caffeine - prevents your mac from dimming or going to sleep when watching a screencast/movie/etc

3) f.lux - Warmer color temperatures and lower brightness as the day progresses, nice for working evenings

4) Alfred - program launcher.

5) BetterTouchTool - extra gestures for your trackpad or magic mouse. I use this all the time.
I find it amazing how many people in a team don't share their insights, assets or experiences with the team. Why is that? Is it fear?
This is a little OT, but I am confused. I just opened an account at MtGox and it is asking me for a verification step, one which will include all my personal data, and a image of my face or scan of an ID card.

I thought the one aspect of bitcoins was anonymity?

They also have been the victim of at least one, probably more, hacking escapades. Why would anyone be inclined to give them this information?

What is a good recommended place to purchase a few coins just for fun? And then do most people xfer then to this CoinBase?
Previous discussion on mapping trains: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4595208
Do You Have A Startup? Or An Expensive Hobby?
Isn't the point of the passion advice that people would wish to put more time into their passion (and find what their passion is to begin with)? So your comment boils down to "it isn't your passion unless it is your passion", which is not very useful.
Apologies to people still waiting for me to grade their part 1 and part 2 answers -- it's a slower process than I hoped for; and I have a big stack (1065 pages, in fact) of scholarship applications which I need to review tonight, so I won't get any more marking done until tomorrow.
Credit card security seems pretty well-solved in Europe, at least once we can ditch all the backcompat measures.

For physical transactions, we have chip-and-pin, which can't be copied like a magstripe. For online transactions, we have securecode/verified by visa.
I'm sorry, but this is really basic stuff, and I doubt it will help any startup founder who has done even ten minutes of research on the topic of PR. Founders without famous backers or extensive networks should look at more advanced marketing and communication techniques, and try to create or participate in a movement that resonates with the press, through a marketing story and through a compelling answer to the question "Why is this done". In getting press and customer interest, I strongly feel that answering why should come before answering how or what. This is why great pitches != great products. Also, it's a very hard process, and lots of PR agencies are surprisingly bad at this. This is one of the reasons why a business co-founder is so important for a startup.
Not that this is very relevant to begin with or anyhing. But as a side note, in this course the solutions tend to be mostly code written by Coursera course people, with some small parts written by the students.
I agree that his first example, "The Girl Named Florida" was a confusing example.

I feel pretty comfortable with Bayesian statistics, and I thought the other examples that I saw were pretty clear. But his very first example jumps you out to another webpage, and then he mixes it with "the red-haired problem". It was irritating.

His next example, "The Cookie Problem" is the classic intro-to-Bayes example, IMO.
Looked at their product and it seemed cool but very limited in its functionality, so I went to the internets and found jetstrap which looks much better
http://www.jetstrap.com/
Yes, he's a pencil pushing fraud for the most part (he might even admit it in private). I don't know how old he is but assuming he's been professional for 10 years, his big contribution is the few hundred/thousand lines of VW (he's probably done other work, but let's assume this is a significant fraction). Where did the rest of his time go? If he just decided to bang VW out a decade ago he'd be at it's current state within a month of starting. VW is only useful because it's fast and it works (and that's not due to any theory). It's theoretical considerations are useful only for essentially drawing that 1 month out to years/decades.
Especially since the Samwers managed to clone the whole thing for Germany. I might actually go with them.
These messages do not show any warnings about possible malicious activity. This is enough to get a few not so computer-savvy people to get robbed.
There's even a piece of job advice floating around: "be careful not to become too good at the things you hate"
Organizing group meetups is a pain. Check out MochaMeet
The true title of this article:

"Why every kid should buy an iPhone and iMac, because that's the only way you can develop iPhone games"

No thank you, Apple.
When I worked in satellite design we never used loctite because of outgassing. Washer thickness and diameter as well as torque was calculated for every screw and bolt. At the assembly at least two people were involved, one would use a digital precision torque wrench to apply the calculated nominal torque, another one would document the applied torque besides part number, date, time, etc. in a report. Assembly in aerospace is a bureaucratic process.
I dont know what the people in these ads are doing.
At time of writing, 59% of trains are delayed. I have very fond memories of train travel in India. I learned a lot about relaxing, and going with the flow.
A dedicated hi-tech service to play strategy and puzzle games then?
Announcing the Cover Art Archive
Or put another way, I think infinity is a good approximation to "very large", and big things are everywhere.
Newsflash: Everyone who possibly can is selling your personal data.
> students rarely go into lecture having done the reading or prep work, and so have a piss-poor retention rate.

I've found that even if do the reading, my brain is often, well, a bit leaky... TT
A saw a post on Twitter a couple of weeks ago from a guy who was in his last week of his job.

He claimed his employer was trying to "milk him" by asking for a handover guide for the next person taking over the role.

I think that people hold onto information for power, to protect their position and to give them leverage over their situation.
Doesn't this depend on your profit margin, which I suspect is larger for cupcakes than muffins... If you sell $40k of cupcakes that cost $39.5k to make, credit risk is much more of an issue than if they cost $20k to make.
Kids should be introduced to a variety of systems and platforms and given enough information to make up their own minds. I love the open source ideology and the tools which have grown out of it, but I can also appreciate that closed systems also have their own set of benefits (and drawbacks).

TL;DR: Indoctrination considered harmful.
Impressionist WP - New Premium WordPress Theme
Impressionist WP is a absolutely new Premium WordPress theme. This theme was created in Magazine, Blog and Business (Corporate) style.
E.T. Jaynes book, "Probability Theory: the Logic of Science" may come close to what you want. It emphasize that there are rules of thought, which lead to Bayesian statistics. As such, Bayesian statistics aren't just a recipe, but the law.

Now, I can only personally vouch for the first 2 chapters, as I haven't read the rest yet.
The SEC's role is to play devil's advocate. You would think it obvious that FB would fight against that.

To me this article screams: "Waaah, I lost money on FB. Yes, they disclosed all of their risks ahead of time, but I would rather they would have predicted the future so I could go back and not invest".

If you think investing in hype is guaranteed money, you deserve what you get.
Good to see the world's largest public sector employer edging towards the technology !
ديكور غرف بنات كبار جددة 2013
I've expressed my personal opinions about NaCl here on HN before too: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2057611
https://www.bitinstant.com/ is often recommended for quick purchases.

Most people keep bitcoins in their own wallets on their own computer, USB sticks, whatever. Make multiple copies of your wallet, and encrypt them if there is any risk of other people getting your wallet. Or test out services like coinbase if you feel comfortable trusting someone else with your money.
Very nice app esp. in context of India where train timings are highly unpredictable.How are they getting real time data - GPS fitted or Indian rail opened APIs?

Good that they mentioned why it is not exact real time ..."For security and regulatory reasons, the information published on RailRadar is delayed for 5 or more minutes."

edit: Rephrased.
that's really great hiring advice. i love this process!
His presentation on slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/flaregames/keeping-your-company-ah...
Why Failure Matters
I guess you missed the next part:

Current SEC policy is to release correspondence no earlier than 20 business days after the IPO. The SEC doesn’t post correspondence “real time,” said John Nester, a spokesman, because “people could misinterpret our questions to companies about their disclosure before companies have had opportunities to provide a complete picture.” By law, “a company is responsible for its own disclosures,” he said.

The rules are the same for everyone... But only scrutinized when a company does poorly.
Chrooting Apache2 With mod_chroot On OpenSUSE 12.2
Many thanks for writing this. I enjoyed reading it. Maybe that are basics, for social media guys. But for tech Start-Up guys this blog post is very use full.
How to Go from Middle-Class to Kickass | Mr. Money Mustache
From a quick glance it looks to only check conflicts at the box level, not row and column. This is the first CoffeeScript I've seen, it's nice and concise.
If you are strong in Python but weak in math, then I would also recommend #3, (Collective Intelligence, by Segaran)
> (not counting places 1-10 for enterprise source control, which basically print money, and of which GitHub is chasing too).

What kind of source control do big corps use? Don't they just use SVN, with enormous budget for maintenance contracts?
>What more do you need?

Well, when you've got a large list of things stored on a computer, and you want them displayed in a certain order, automatic sorting (after you assign a priority) is a lot more useful than having to rearrange them manually.
Typographic effects in canvas
I've yet to read the whole story but I see how entertaining the narration is. If you compiled several such stories into a book…
Sigh... I don't care about the pretty buttons, I just want a payment service that works.

After another spate of PayPal randomly refusing my customer's payments, I've just spent most of my day searching for an alternative, AGAIN. Stripe, Dwolla, you name it - all closed to non-US residents.

US-based companies have a significant advantage here. They can sell globally because the rest of the world is used to paying in US dollars. But North American customers are paranoid about paying in other currencies, and don't understand the concept of exchange rates.

If anyone can tell me how to get an account with ANY mainstream US payment processor (except PayPal), I would be forever in your debt. There is a HUGE opportunity here. There are thousands of reputable companies from reputable countries that would jump aboard within days.
Australian government refuses to disclose web snooping plan
Facebook has peaked and the only people who could have made money from the IPO were the founders and early investors, Zuckerberg cashed out 1 billion, that was the end game for him. I doubt he will care much about what happens to facebook now. Anyone who bought shares is a complete moron and deserved to be fleeced.
I thought this was going to be a search engine for things that are fun.
"world's largest public sector employer"

That dubious honour appears to belong to the US Dept. of Defense:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_employers